(I love the spike in 2006 right after Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book was published. )

So for all this hype, expectations are perhaps getting a bit out of hand.    Yesterday I read a blog post saying that crowdsourcing really isn’t all that useful for humanitarian efforts.   Isn’t it just a bit early to declare that?   That’s kind of like concluding in 1990 the Internet isn’t all that useful.

We all hear daily about great examples of success with crowdsourcing (and some not as successful) but let’s remember we are still very early on.  I’ll be the first to say we don’t have all of the answers, yet.  There is so much more to discover, learn and improve on for tapping collective wisdom.  We constantly come up with new crowdsourcing models, adjust incentives, voting styles, and find better ways of analyzing the data that results,  and there is just SO much more room for growth.

That’s what makes what we do here at Chaordix so exciting.   Not that there is so much hype, but that we know the best is yet to come.  So maybe Ushahidi isn’t that useful for the relief aid worker on the street today, but in the future, I’m positive relief agencies will learn how to use this valuable crowdsourced information and network for their benefit,  and the benefit of the victims of natural disasters.   Just as I’m equally sure for everyone reading this post, your company or organization will also soon be benefiting from some sort of crowdsourcing in the not too distant future. (even if it’s just to design your next donut.)

Anyone who’s  been to London, knows the phrase “Mind the Gap” which warns people riding the Underground to watch their step as they go from platform to train.

As I watched The Gap’s logo “update” unfold last week,  “mind the gap” seemed apropos as a caution for businesses: watch your step or you might get hurt.  In this case, The Gap has taken some steps with their logo that may hurt their brand.  It’s too early to tell how their brand will be impacted, but one thing is for sure, other brands can and must learn from it.

If you’ve been watching, you’ve seen how the story has been shaped by the public on platforms like Twitter and The Gap’s Facebook page:  The Gap introduced a new logo last week that received overwhelmingly bad reaction from both their customers and from the design community.   The overall reaction can be summed up as “how could they?”  How could Gap change their logo without getting approval from their market place?   Those in the brand world know this is reminiscent of another similar incident with Tropicana.   The good news for Gap – people have grown up with the Gap logo and have developed a very strong connection to it.  The bad news -the masses aren’t happy and that puts The Gap at risk of losing loyalty and brand respect.

There are three lessons that all brands can stand to learn from what The Gap is going through.

Lesson #1 – Don’t change your brand in a vacuum

Like it or not, the days of companies independently crafting and broadcasting their brands are over.  As more companies open themselves up, consumers are now empowered and increasingly expect to be involved in the brands and products they feel strongly about.  The silver lining is that crowd-powered insight and rich market understanding represents a great untapped asset for brands and can bring them closer to their marketplace. This direct input can dramatically lower the risk of backlash, and enhance the probability of a successful rollout for new products, ad campaigns, and yes, logos.

Lesson #2 – React quickly, get involved

Kudos to The Gap for getting this part right.  They were watching and very quickly saw that market reaction to their new logo was not positive.   They immediately recognized the misstep and embraced it as an opportunity.    This is a key skill all brand managers need to develop:  reacting quickly and getting involved with both positive and negative threads in the social media world.  Done well, negatives can be turned into positives, but you have to act fast.

Lesson #3 – Get it right the second time

Here’s where the jury is still out for The Gap.  When you trip, people will scrutinize your next steps closely.    In my opinion, they have already stumbled a bit by announcing last week that they would open themselves up to crowd input for a new logo, but today announced they’re just going to stick with the old logo.   I believe they are passing up on a tremendous opportunity.   Rather than turn this episode into a positive, they are condemning it  go down  in history as just another highly visible marketing failure, a la New Coke.  The Gap  had the world’s attention, and probably hundreds of thousands of people ready to get involved.   Instead, they are just walking away from the opportunity of  using it as a springboard for greater market interaction and involvement.

Today brands are a two-way relationship. Take advantage of the crowd’s desire to contribute and keep you relevant to the market and your brand will benefit.   If you still think you can steer your brand without market participation, well… mind the gap.

In a post two weeks ago, we talked about how crowdsourcing for market research can avoid some of the inherent biases that can come with traditional research techniques.   There is another reason for why crowdsourcing is being increasingly applied for market research: it can result in better data.

A common question we hear is “how is the quality of information, ideas and data derived from crowdsourcing better than what you might get from traditional research?”   Here are a few answers:

More ideas: With a traditional survey, each recipient fills out the questions based on their thinking right then.  Once they have filled out the survey, they usually can’t go back to add additional thoughts that might come to them later.   In addition, since they can’t see other respondents’ replies to the survey (by design), their own thinking isn’t triggered by the thoughts of others.  How many times has a good idea come to you because of something someone else said?    Crowdsourcing provides not only a way to capture ideas both now and later, since most crowdsourcing sites live on for weeks if not months, it also enables the sharing of responses that can trigger more thoughts and ideas.

Better ideas: With traditional surveys, each respondent puts in their own ideas, and then those ideas are rolled up and analyzed, but at no point is there collaboration that enables the improvement of those ideas.   Sometimes this is desirable and intended, but if you are looking for innovation, what you really want are the best ideas, shaped and enhanced by the collective intelligence, experience and viewpoints of the community.   In some crowdsourcing models, the submitters or “owners” of the ideas can revise and enhance their ideas based on the feedback and comments from the crowd.   In addition, through ranking or voting, you get a relative rating of how the crowd feels about a particular idea relative to the other ideas submitted.   This can result in both better input, and a way to more clearly determine market preference.

Multi-media input: When was the last time you took a survey that allowed you to upload an image, document, hyperlink, or video to help communicate your idea?  This is becoming standard practice in crowdsourcing both for initial ideation, and increasingly for commenting and suggestions to those ideas.

Explicit and Implicit Data: When you think of crowdsourcing, you think of the ideas, comments and votes that generally come along with that.  Those are all forms of explicit data, and by themselves can provide superior input for market research than traditional research means as discussed above.   But with crowdsourcing, you can also measure how the crowd interacts with the data itself, which can provide valuable implied insight that traditional research would miss. Implicit data can include things like how often an idea was viewed vs. how often it was given a positive vote.   This is an important way to find ideas that might be superior ideas even though they didn’t get the most votes. (there are lots of reasons why the best idea might not get the most votes, but we’ll hold that for another post).   Analyzing comments to find the frequency of use of certain terms is another piece of implicit data that allows identification of important trends and themes.

I’ll stop here, but you get the drift.  Include your crowds in a collaborative way for market research, and you’ll likely derive better quality input.

Up next:  Identifying your best respondents

As Chaordix understands, unleashing human potential in the workplace is a delicate balance between two seemingly oppositional human needs. On one hand, all of us want to have the freedom to be in control of our own environment and have a say in determining the shape of the world around us. And alongside our need for freedom, there is an equally pressing human desire – for structure, for clarity of purpose, and for a sense of order to the world in which we live and work.

These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are particularly relevant to business leaders, who must strike the right balance between the two in order to create healthy, high-functioning work environments. And although tools like Chaordix are essential resources, they alone are insufficient to transform the culture of an organization.

In my years as an organizational change consultant, I have witnessed scores of leaders that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. But I wrote my newest book to deliver a simple message: We do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. In fact, research confirms that when organizational leaders do so, they create optimal conditions for ongoing learning, motivation and engagement.

Now, more than ever, people are clamoring for these sorts of work environments. We need places that provide employees with well-structured spaces in which to discover what they care most deeply about. We need workplaces where adults work collaboratively to identify innovative solutions and uncover better ways of satisfying the bottom line. And we need workplaces that strategically harness the power of crowdsourcing to generate a collective intelligence far superior to the work of any individual or workgroup.

All of us – whether we are CEOs, customers, or staff members – must become more attuned to these tensions, and to the individual and group needs of the people around us. When we do so, we create the types of businesses that confer not just a place to go to work in the morning, but also a place to strategically harness the power and uniqueness of each person’s voice.

Sam Chaltain is a DC-based educator and organizational change consultant. He works with schools, school districts, and public and private sector companies to help them create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. To learn more, please contact Sam directly:

Sam Chaltain
Democracy. Learning. Voice.
703 851 7826
http://www.samchaltain.com
http://twitter.com/samchaltain

We powered PwC’s Digital Compass call on how Canada can lead in a digital economy. I’m really interested in the topic, so I spent a good amount of time in there reading the ideas, commenting and voting. The campaign lasted for 7 weeks, with 6 calls (one a week) and then a week long showdown.

It just finished Tuesday, with the top 3 idea submitters getting passes to the Canada3.0 conference in Ontario. For more information on how it worked, watch for our upcoming interview with PwC. In the meantime, here are some of the things I thought were interesting about crowdsourcing a call like this:

-          Time well spent. Compared to other solution hunt projects, PwC had high participation. The effort it took to stop, come up with an idea that could improve Canada’s digital economy and then write it down was a lot to ask of people. Yet 73 ideas were thoughtfully submitted.

-          Not a popularity contest. Community members that actively recruited their friends seem no more likely to receive votes. Before anyone could vote, they had to sign up and then hit the list of all ideas. It seems as though this extra step meant that friends voted for what they thought was the best idea. As people took an interest in the topic, the quality of submissions and comments remained high.

-          Improving quality of life. In Canada, we’re concerned about healthcare The idea on Digital Health Care took home the most votes. I think this is indicative of how the nation feels right now. Technology and gadgets are cool, but now we want to see practical applications for them that really improve our lives.

We’ll see organizations use crowdsourcing to innovate and advance more and more in the future. It can engage a crowd for breakthrough ideas, production of technology or products and problem solving that is impossible using internal employees alone. We’re hoping our upcoming project we’re working on with Oxford will bring us closer to solving some of those problems, specifically around delivering lifesaving maternal healthcare. Stay tuned for more details!

photo by: dancoulter

Wikipedia says it is nowhere near this. They point out that Mr. Ortega raises valid challenges for Wikipedia in the future, but his numbers are off. Details aside, how many editors does Wikipedia need at this point?

Back in 2001, Wikipedia needed content, but that was years ago. Now, everything you can think of has an entry. Is it possible that we simply don’t need as many editors any more? Perhaps the time has come for experts on different subjects to review and improve the content that is already there.

Whether there is a decline in editors, or the numbers are holding steady, we don’t see this as a negative sign for Wikipedia, we just think of it as an evolution. At almost ten years old, it is a great example of the wisdom of crowds and how that collective intelligence can be used. It will be interesting to see how the next few years unfold for Wikipedia.

Does what they see affect what you get with crowdsourced input?

To get truly valid data on crowd demand do you have to remove the risk of a popularity contest? That’s one of the common questions we get asked around crowdsourcing and voting.

To shed some light on this, we thought we’d share what we discussed with good friend Veer Gidwaney, Founder of Humanity Calls – a platform where crowds of people assemble online to evaluate charities and make donations to those organizations which perform best – set to launch early 2010.

Here’s what we’ve seen as the affects of transparency in the crowds we’ve worked with:

Crowd votes totally hidden

Pros

• Makes people think for themselves & eliminates group think
• Produces incredibly valuable data

Cons

• Seeing “group think” is interesting, engaging and can foster participation
• Without ranking of ideas/solutions into top voted, it can be overwhelming for people to sort through and parse items for voting

Vote totals shown, individual votes hidden

Pros

• Presenting highest vote listing engages crowd, gets them voting
• Crowd’s time gets focused on crowd-deemed highest quality ideas/solutions

Cons

• Biases crowd energy towards top voted ideas/solutions – other high potential ideas never get seen
• Earliest in ideas/solutions biased to get most votes

Individual votes and vote totals seen by all

Pros

• With full transparency, the amount of malicious votes drops dramatically
• Crowd has means to spot and report voting irregularities

Cons

• People swayed to vote for ideas/solutions by the most popular crowd members
• As with just showing vote totals – attention biased to top voted/earliest in ideas

So with limits on all voting models – how do you best limit bias? First, pick the model with the strengths best suited to your crowd and purpose. Second, consider other means to reduce the risk of bias:

• Broaden what’s filtered & presented: Would you get more useful results and participation displaying not only top voted, but most viewed, most commented or a random display of ideas and solutions?
• Get experts to aid in filtering: Might an expert panel reviewing all ideas and filtering to top ideas for a tournament get to the most valuable winning idea?
• Pace/Batch the voting: Consider weekly or monthly showdowns to keep the volume of ideas/solutions manageably viewable by the crowd– with a tournament of finalists at the end.

These are some of our best practices & lessons learned. What have you seen work to limit crowd bias in voting?

Thanks Veer for reaching out to us!

photo by: starbright31

Making a successful shift to open innovation requires some behavioural and attitude changes and new technology adoption, but when done right the rewards can be enormous.

We’ve worked on and studied dozens of crowdsourcing initiatives, and while we, and everyone involved with crowdsourcing, continue to learn on a daily basis, there are some emerging guiding principals that seem to lead to crowdsourcing success. On the surface, crowdsourcing seems easy – shout a question out to the crowd, get their ideas and allow them to vote on the best. But we’ve found that for true performance and profit driving results, you need to pay attention to these principals:

#1 – Right Purpose
Call to the crowd for insight you will act on

A little bit of time up front in planning out your Crowdsource campaign can dramatically increase the value you will derive from it. Just like in the early days of e-commerce, the companies that truly benefited from the online business shift were those that well conceived the potential of the technology applied to their business problems, market and organizational behaviors. For high ROI crowdsourcing you need to be clear on: What issues or opportunities facing your organization can a crowd answer for you? Where can you improve product development, R&D, policy development, your brand positioning or market research by adopting open innovation? And as important, who are the leaders in your organization that will champion and commit to acting on the input from the crowd. There is no law that says you have to implement what the crowd decides, but you need to be ready to acknowledge the crowd’s input and broadcast the action you are taking and why.

Take heart, crowdsourcing is not new and the early adopters have already proven its value. Since 2002, British Telecom has used open innovation to source innovations externally from suppliers, partners and academia, which have contributed £500m in potential new product and services revenues. BT also uses crowdsourcing internally has reached out to employees for ideas on methods or products to improve service delivery and lower costs. BT rewards employees by sharing the value of the idea – paying out up to 10 per cent of the savings or additional income generated by the initiative to a maximum of £30,000.

#2 Right Call
Tell the crowd what you want from them

‘Find a new way to sweep floors.’ That was the call that led the crowd to suggest the Swiffer concept to Proctor and Gamble. Once you know the problem the crowd can help with, and pick the crowd to tap, you need to nail the question that is both provocative and specific to get people to contribute.

The calls need not be meaningful to the broad public. “Method to identify specific lactobacillus strains in clinical samples,” “Portable detector of specific DNA sequences” – These are just some of the dozens of calls put out to the research and scientists that make up the more than 100,000-member InnoCentive community.

At the same time, the call needs to provide context for the crowd. If the call is too vague, your results will also be vague. Give the crowd room to get creative, but at the same time, make sure the call leads in the direction you want to head. A lesson here can be learned from Heinz. In their original Top This TV challenge, they weren’t specific on what would and wouldn’t be acceptable in terms of profanity, brand values and so on for crowd contributed TV ad ideas. There will always be contributions from the crowd that are off the mark, but you can improve the quality of crowd input by offering clear submission requirements up front. And remember, you can always ask post further calls to the crowd, so don’t try to solve all of your problems in one call!

#3 Right Crowd
Crowd needs to be diverse and qualified

If you had access to every genius on any given topic, you would likely get very accurate answers to questions. The problem is, as Bill Joy Cofounder Sun Microsystems says, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” So is there a better way to get to genius results?

Crowdsourcing is built on the scientific premise that the most consistently accurate answers come from a crowd diverse enough to go at a question from different angles without the inherent bias of like-thinking people. This smart crowd outcome is referred to as “collective intelligence.” To achieve it, the crowd needs to be qualified. To solve a pharmaceutical problem for example you don’t necessarily need working scientists, but people with at least hobbyist knowledge in biochemistry. The basic rule of thumb is the crowd members should at least be somewhat knowledgeable about the topic of the call. What is the minimum membership for a crowd to deliver true intelligence? The jury is still out. Crowdsourcing guru Jeff Howe suggests 5000 people. Some say it could be fewer.

You need not be mega-consumer brand calling to the public to benefit from crowdsourcing. Private crowdsourcing where the crowd is made up of partners, an existing crowdsourcing community like ChallengePost, or your employees are just as successful. For its CoolSW (cool software) initiative, Intel tapped its 80,000 employees to help find “next to win” companies for Intel to get its chips inside and invest in. Employees across the company, from marketing to manufacturing, new interns to VPs, were invited to suggest and vote on who they thought were up-and-coming winners. Employees brought email provider Zimbra to the company’s attention. Intel invested in them and soon after Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo.

#4 Right Incentives
Glory, ego, altruism, greed – feed the crowd’s needs

The right incentives have been proven to attract and keep participation high.
Cash prize based crowdsourcing, like the $10 million+ X Prize award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal which has the potential to benefit humanity, are gaining popularity and are conveniently valuable anywhere in the world. However, prizes need not be this big, or even in cash. There are many other forms of incentives to consider such as including a partner relationship with a reseller, an introduction to a hard to reach government agency or corporation, financing for an idea, or exposure at an industry-shaping event or in the media. Ask any entrepreneur who successfully competed for investment on The Dragon’s Den and they are likely to share that even without the investment, the exposure on national television was a boon.

Beware focusing too much on picking the right prize or reward is a wise caution offered by most crowdsourcing experts. The prize alone won’t make your open innovation successful. But it’s still a vital to get right as a component in your crowdsourcing effort. To pick the right reward for your crowdsourcing initiative, start by doing some math on the value of the answer that you are seeking to your organization, add in the value of the new relationships or market knowledge that the crowdsourcing will deliver. On the other side of the equation, consider the crowd contributors that you will need to attract and ask what’s required to motivate them. It’s worth noting the finding of The McKinsey & Company Report. And the winner is… “One of prizes’ great strengths is their ability to attract investments from competitors many times greater than the cost of delivering and awarding a prize.”

Not everyone is going to win. How do you get people to participate and stay contributing through the process? Beyond the reward that goes to the one winner, and perhaps two or three runners up, there need to be perks along the way for participating and contributing high value. Motivational incentives can take the form of badges, points (a currency unique to your community), spotlighting or heightened profile in your promotions and in the community. Pace the distribution and variety of these perks based on a keen x-ray of the fame, fortune, glory and altruism characteristics of your crowd members.

#5 Right Model
Identify the output needed from the crowd

The models proven for crowdsourcing include harnessing crowd wisdom, crowd production and crowd funding. What you need from the crowd – ideas, something solved, or funds – determine which model is the best fit for your business.

Perhaps like American Idol or NY1 – you have a short list of options and you want the crowd to take the risk out of picking the right one. This crowd contribution of ideas and most importantly filtering to the winner is often called wisdom of the crowd. Sony uses it with American Idol to have music buyers tell them in advance which artist they want to listen to. This has contributed multi-millions to Sony’s bottom line from sure to go platinum albums. New York television news program NY1, posts possible news headlines for the day on their website and asks viewers what they most want see on the news that night. Both NY1 and Sony are seeking to take the risk out of appealing to consumers. They let the crowd preview products without the full cash outlaying of going to market. A twist on this is the MyStarbucks Idea website. Starbucks doesn’t pre-create the ideas for rank, but it knows the areas of innovation that drive its success and ask the crowd for input on those topics.

Open innovation can result in more than ideas; it can provide solutions to problems otherwise impossible or too time or cost consuming to tackle. Research breakthroughs, scientific advancement, product innovation methods, and process and service improvement solutions have all been achieved by world-leading organizations calling to the crowd. An example underway is the contest to improve the movie recommendation system of U.S. online movie rental giant, Netflix. Their ability to suggest great movies to members is a major contributor to their market success. With the Netflix Prize they called to the crowd to improve the accuracy of their system’s predictions by 10 per cent plus. They are blunt in stating that the challenge is hard (or else they would have solved it themselves!) and offer competing teams a $1 million grand prize plus $50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs to keep contestants motivated. At the time of publishing this article, Netflix has received 44,014 valid submissions from 5,169 different teams and has registered contestants from 186 different countries.

What if it’s not ideas or solutions that are an obstacle for your organization but capital? Perhaps the least prolific and some would stay yet-to-mature, crowdsourcing model focuses on crowdfunding. The idea is to re-invent traditional models of investment that are often elitist, exclusive, bias power on the side of the investor, and shut out people with desire to fund but without major cash on hand or expertise in the process. Passionate advocates see crowdfunding as having the potential to profoundly renovate models of venture capital, non-profit fundraising and entirely cutting out the need for power and profit hording funders in arenas like music and film.

Nonprofit microfinance organization Kiva.org gives donors the means to help finance micro-loans to small business entrepreneurs throughout the developing world. Kiva proven immensely popular with online donors looking for an alternative to traditional charity asks. Kiva raised $1m in its first year, $10m in year two and $40m by the end of its third year in October 2008. In the music world, Sellaband.com invites fans to contribute in $10 increments to raise the $50k required for their band to record a first album. If the bands prove successful, fan investors can earn their investment back through subsequent music revenues. Stephen Colbert, DonorsChoose.org and the Gates Foundation announced in April 2009 the “Double Your Impact” challenge inviting citizen philanthropists to join them in donating to school projects to assist students in readying for college. Through DonorsChoose.org the crowd picks what they want to fund and for how much, with a 50 percent match from Bill & Melinda and friends.

#6 Right Promotion
Get people in & get them spreading the word

It’s common for people to understand marketing but overlook the importance of direct community recruitment in making crowdsourcing successful.

Naturally, you need to put together an appealing pitch on your crowdsourcing call and use multiple means to get the word out: PR, website, email promo, blog, social media like Twitter and so on. Successful crowdsourcing leaders go beyond promotion though, and directly reach out to recruit crowd members from other existing communities and online social networks. Be clear on the mix of people you need to make your community productive and lively then do a live outreach to other like-minded communities and social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace to build relationships with people and share the word about your new community. Make sure your crowdsourcing platform gives your participants easy ways to reach to their crowds and invite them in. Seek out connectors and mavens to join early and tip others into your crowd. Reward them amply and arm them with exciting notifications that get them talking about you.

#7 Right Community Management
Nurture crowd participation and know when to chime in

Successful community management is about the give and take between the crowd host and the community. When Dell put a call out to their crowd for product suggestions they faced passionate agitators that went on a Linux integration rampage. Rather than fight to keep their community quiet, or force them in another direction, Dell started shipping Linux on their computers and earned more than $3 million in direct sales while converting dedicated antagonists into evangelists.

Your community manager (or group of them!) is the human glue of your community. They need to greet all new members, moderate discussions, resolve conflict, be an agent of productivity keeping tasks on track, as well as pose provocative questions to enliven the community and stewarding successful crowdsourcing outcomes (read data mining). Select this person carefully and beware the temptation of thinking someone can do this “on the side.” Community management is both an art and a science and a lot can be taught by people who have done it before. If you don’t have anyone in house with community management experience, think about bringing someone in to train your people, or even hiring outsourced community management.

#8 Right Technology
Features vary, beware one size fits all

You can get everything else right, but without the right crowdsourcing technology your open innovation may flop. One size doesn’t fit all. If you want to run a one-time contest, or do a sophisticated poll with comments, there are quick tools that you can spin up. If you are looking to attract and maintain a crowd for multiple calls over time, or are very serious about data validity and mining it, you need more robust technology.

Things to consider when investigating crowdsourcing products: Do you need anti-bias mechanisms that protect against vote stacking and other crowd activity that can void results? Do you need features that let contributors to reach out via other social media like Twitter and to social networks like Facebook to foster participation and crowd growth? Does your community manager need an instant view into crowd activity that makes it easy to moderate conversations, resolve any conflict and keep members constructively participating? Do you need to be able to apply incentive programs including badges or points, along with cash awards? And if you are seeking to keep a crowd engaged over time, pay serious attention to community features including rich profiling, follow and friend features.

Over time you will learn what is and what isn’t working in your crowdsourcing. Consider The Guardian’s call to the crowd to review 458,832 pages of public records to find MP expenses worthy of investigation. They built a quickie crowdsourcing site using Django and EC2 at little cost, but two months into the crowdsourcing effort, only 45 per cent of the documents are reviewed and the crowd seems to be losing interest. Unfortunately, the technology they used lacks the richness and flexibility for mid-stream re-tuning. If they had chosen higher-powered technology they could now add new incentives, perhaps batch the remaining documents for review in a couple deadline-driven tournaments to reinvigorate the crowdsourcing effort, getting the document review completed and proving they are responsive and dedicated to readers – a wise move for print media these days.

Making the shift

How does an organization get started with open innovation? These principles of crowdsourcing are guidelines to help you set up and run a high impact open innovation initiative. Getting started takes a clear business purpose.

To identify the most valuable opportunities for crowdsourcing within your organization consider:

• Which challenges facing your business is a crowd qualified to answer for you?
• Which crowd has most to contribute to you – perhaps your employees, external partners or the broad public?
• Where can you reduce current organizational costs or improve innovation?
• Who, in your organization, is best to champion calling for and implementing answers from the crowd?

We made a really pretty downloadable PDF version for you too.

We often talk about crowdsourcing for collective intelligence, or ideation. What about crowdsourcing for crowd production? Putting a call out to get a high volume of simple tasks done quickly and economically – even free.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been around for several years now, with (currently) over 57,000 “Human Intelligence Tasks.” There’s also Crowdflower, a site currently in Beta, created for small tasks that humans do better than computers.

Another newcomer to the crowd production arena is The Guardian. On June 18th, it launched the “Join us in investigating your MP’s expenses” campaign calling to the crowd to overcome the data hurdle of holding MP’s accountable for irresponsible spending of public funds. The crowd was asked to sift through more than 450,000 pages of public records to find MP expenses worth investigating.

Not only has the exercise proven a good comeback for The Guardian after The Telegraph increased its readership by over 600,000 with access to the documents a month earlier, but The Guardian discovered a new-world way to enlist readers to help whistle blow irresponsible acts by public officials. It is nice to see journalism and crowdsourcing play nice together for a change.

What do you see as the future for crowdsourcing for news media?

For a business shift that’s about inviting in non-experts, hobbyists and hackers, there’s a lot of insider lingo around crowdsourcing. This begins the first of a series of straight talk on crowdsourcing principles to help us all put the theory into practice.

What is collective intelligence? Jeff Howe, the guy that came up with the term crowdsourcing, says it this way, “A central principle animating crowdsourcing is that the group contains more knowledge than individuals.” James Suroweicki says, “Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.” This is the science that explains why when asked for a lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the crowd guesses 91% correctly, whereas experts have a 61% likelihood of getting the right answer. The answers that come from crowdsourcing are called collective intelligence or wisdom of crowds. Yes, two terms for the same thing.

So what does it take to achieve collective intelligence? Will any group of people do? Crowdsourcing has three unique requirements to deliver collective intelligence – (1) a diverse crowd, (2) a qualified crowd, and (3) the right sized crowd.

Crowd Must Be Diverse
Crowdsourcing requires a mix of people who aren’t too much alike.
If you had the undivided attention of every genius on any given topic, you would get very accurate answers to questions. The problem is, as Bill Joy Cofounder Sun Microsystems says “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” So is there another way to get to genius results? Contrary to popular belief, a group of the most highly accredited or accomplished brains on a topic do not produce the best answers. Crowdsourcing shows that breakthrough solutions more reliably come from a diverse enough set of minds to go at the question from different angles without the bias inherent in like-thinking people. American Idol wouldn’t work to accurately predict best-selling pop stars if everyone voting had identical musical tastes. Goldcorp would not have found a total of 8 million ounces of gold if they hadn’t invited not just geologists but grad students, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers into its Goldcorp Challenge.

Crowd Must Be Qualified
Crowdsourcing takes people who are interested and capable.
Qualifying a crowd is about finding people with an interest in the subject with the technical skill to provide the answer or perform the task. For answers on how to better operate your business, the best crowd is likely your employees and partners. They know the company and are motivated to make it work better. For a research breakthrough on a diabetes drug, it would take a crowd with competence and passion in medicine – but don’t just think doctors or others in lab coats. As InnoCentive has proven, solutions to scientific challenges may come from students, retired members of a field, or in the case of a drug discovery, why not a technically astute patient with experience on what drugs have worked? Procter & Gamble has a publicly-available connect + develop crowdsourcing site to seek new product insight as the company recognizes that everyone is a consumers or potential consumers of its millions of products.

Crowd Must Be Right Size
The simpler the crowdsourcing question the larger the crowd needed.
Crowdsourcing involves many models where the simple majority does not rule, instead different members vote with different weight or perhaps expert moderators have influence. To keep it simple though, let’s talk about crowdsourcing where the majority will pick the winning solution. How many people does it take for the majority answer to be right? The answer depends on the simplicity of the question: Who should be the world’s next mega pop star? That’s a question every pop music listener is qualified to answer. More than 100 million crowd members cast votes via telephone and text-message to determine the last American Idol (of course the controversy ensues about vote rigging). What is the next cool software worthy of Intel’s chips inside and their investment? That’s a more specialized question, with fewer qualified to answer. Profitable insight there took a crowd of Intel’s 80,000 employees. The jury is still out on the minimum size of a crowd for collective intelligence. Jeff Howe mentions 5000. Some say it could be fewer. Like other crowdsourcing pioneers, we continue to test crowd size and other principles to hone the reliability of crowdsourcing results.

What have your experiences shown about the principles of crowdsourcing? We welcome your comments.

photo by Sreejith K